Pages

Saturday, 17 September 2016

Learning new languages can be a source of unexpected pleasure. I don’t just mean the perhaps more familiar prospects that making sense of the languages will make sense of people and cultures that up to then had struck us as ‘odd’, or allow us to acquire, first-hand, knowledge and wisdom that we had no idea existed because we had no idea how to access the code that gives them voice. I also mean making sense of the languages as objects of discovery themselves, which goes well beyond the utilitarian purposes we’re commonly told we should learn languages for.

I mean the fun of cracking, bit by bit, on our own, the puzzles that languages are, as when we start asking ourselves questions like Can we say things this way? or How come there are words for this? Eventually, such ‘this’ questions lead to their ‘that’ counterparts – How about that way? Can there be words for that, too? Asking ‘that’ questions means that we’re ready to take ownership of our new languages, prompting us to attempt to answer these questions ourselves.

Exploring possibilities in this way is what learning is all about. Children do it – which may well explain why they are said to be expert language learners. Encouraging similar exploration among older learners, including of the mistakes that inevitably follow and that provide evidence of learning, would thus appear to assist language learning. H. G. Widdowson thought so, when he argued that “proficiency only comes with nonconformity” in The ownership of English, and so did Guy Cook in Language Play, Language Learning.

Yet learners’ attempts at putting their linguistic resourcefulness to good use in their learning are deemed inappropriate, as Nelson Flores and Jonathan Rosa discuss in Undoing appropriateness: Raciolinguistic ideologies and language diversity in education. Curtailing learner inventiveness in judgemental terms draws on two paradoxes. First, the framing of learners’ “linguistic practices as deficient regardless of how closely they follow supposed rules of appropriateness”, in Flores and Rosa’s words, that is, of how closely they follow ‘native speaker’ standards. And second, the predication of creativity on multilingualism while condemning multilingual creativity for not being monolingual.

Wanting to be taught language that matters to us, wondering about ‘this’ and ‘that’ questions in our new languages, and wanting to be allowed to find answers to them are signs of linguistic competence. Nancy Bell and Anne Pomerantz have researched these issues for the past two decades, pointing out the fictional nature of traditional language learning materials and encouraging the expansion of learner repertoires through active engagement with the languages. In their new book, Humor in the Classroom. A Guide for Language Teachers and Educational Researchers, they argue that understanding and producing language play is a good indicator of proficiency, too. They reject the contention that “humor and play have no place in the serious business of scholarship, let alone language education”, by revisiting misconceptions about “unconventional talk, particularly as they relate to how we understand language use, language learning, and language teaching in educational spaces.”

Addressing language learners’ linguistic resourcefulness in teaching materials, teaching methods and classroom practices might mean unlearning the modes and contents of what we’ve come to expect of traditional language teaching, for both instructors and learners. But I suspect there may well be unexpected sources of teaching and learning pleasure in starting to ask ‘that’ questions about our current language teaching philosophies, and looking for answers to them.

Saturday, 23 July 2016

I met a Scandinavian couple the other
day, who had visited Portugal countless times. They waxed lyrical
about the country, its beauty, its history, its food, its people (I can, by the way, impartially confirm that their comments were spot
on), and told me they would be moving there soon. Paperwork,
housing and banking matters were all good to go, and they were
delighted to have found a native who could answer their less
bureaucratic questions.

“So when will you start learning
Portuguese?”, I asked in turn. “Oh, no need for that!”, they
waved me aside, “Everyone speaks English there”. They do?, I
thought, wondering what everyone and English might mean, whenever anyone says what they’d just said. Okay, I
went on thinking, so they’re aiming to make a home of Portugal’s beauty, history, food, and people in a language that is neither theirs nor the country’s.
How will that work itself out?, I wanted to ask next but, before I
could, they added: “Besides, we’re not good at languages.”

I must have mumbled something in
response, and we probably went on talking about the marvels, the
enrichment, etc. etc., afforded by travelling the world. I can’t
remember. I’ve learned to switch to sociable autopilot after that
line, one that I’ve heard countless times and as infinitely tried
to counter, to null effect. The cumulative facts that I use more than
the magical number of just two languages in my daily life and that I ‘work with languages’ apparently make me
unsuitable to speak for the learning of new ones. “You’re gifted
for languages”, people nod knowledgeably at me and, as far as
they’re concerned, this compliment ends the argument.

The issue is, of course, that this is
no compliment at all. It makes light of the tremendous amount of time, will, engagement, openness to input, readiness for practice that goes into learning any language, any time, whether we’re big or small. It tells me and other language learners that
we’ve learned our languages because we were, literally, given
something that we didn’t need to have merited to earn. It tells me
and other believers in hard work that we should believe instead in
easy handouts that we can’t help being awarded – or not awarded:
the corollary of gift theories of learning is that some of us “are
not good” at learning certain things, and can’t help it either.

The issue is also that the
gifted-for-languages reasoning is flawed. It says that in order to be
able to learn languages we must be good at languages. So are we all
gifted, since all of us are good at learning at least one language,
or does linguistic giftedness apply only to multilinguals? In that
case, the gift can only reveal itself after we’ve learned a couple of languages, since nobody is born using them. So was there a gift to
start off with, or did we acquire language learning skills on the
job? Are we talking nature or nurture?

Understand me right: I’m not denying
giftedness. I’m saying that arguing that you can only learn to use
new languages if you’re gifted for languages makes as much sense as
arguing that you can only learn to use new smartphones if you’re
gifted for smartphones. I can’t deny giftedness because the single
most important thing I’ve learned from my 40+ years as a teacher is
that we’re all gifted. The trick is to find where that gift lies,
which is not necessarily where entitled education policy-makers keep
telling us where to look.
In order to be good at what we do, what we need to be given is
the chance to develop what we’ve got. Francis Bacon dixit, in Novum Organon, 1: CXXI:
“So again the seeds of things are of much latent virtue, and yet of
no use except in their development”. Or, as Edward M. Hundert puts
it in the last paragraph of his book Lessons from an Optical Illusion. On Nature and Nurture, Knowledge and Values, we
must strive to “nurture that nature that has nurtured us”.

Let me leave you with two other nuggets
of wisdom about learners and learning: Aristotle’s “Consuetudo
est altera natura” (‘Habit is second nature’) and Quintilian’s
“Consuetudo certissima est loquendi magistra” (‘Usage is the
best language teacher’). Consuetudo is where we find the gift.

I’m sure that my new friends will
enjoy living in Portugal – their way, with expat English among English-speaking Portuguese. They won’t notice, and I
won’t tell them, what they’ll miss about Portugal’s consuetudines. Or about exploring unsuspected language learning skills, more on which next time.

Saturday, 9 July 2016

Before I started the Endangered Alphabets project, I thought of myself as being multilingual: good
French, decent German, solid Latin, tourist Spanish and Italian,
toasts in Russian and obscenities in half a dozen languages.

Now, after seven years of carving the
world’s most obscure and endangered writing systems, it’s clear
what a novice I am. I just received a Facebook birthday card from a
colleague who wrote in a dozen languages, most of them endangered.
And my ethnocentricity has been challenged head-on by the fact that
in doing more than 100 carvings in more than 30 different minority
scripts I can now read precisely one word in a non-Latin script: the
Balinese word suksma,
meaning ‘thank you’.

The
Balinese word “suksma”
(‘thank you’).

Carved
in cherry

Photo
credit: Tom Way

Yet oddly enough my insular limitations
have also been a strength in this ongoing project, or at least have
offered me perspectives that might otherwise be hard to come by. My first exhibition of carvings, all of
which featured Article One of the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights in endangered writing systems, grew out of my stumbling upon
Omniglot, the online encyclopedia of writing
systems and languages. It was a revelation. I thought of myself as
fairly well-traveled and widely-read, yet I’d never heard of
probably 85% of the languages on Omniglot. And the texts themselves
were all Greek to me – well, more than Greek, given that in many
cases I couldn’t pronounce a single glyph or understand a single
word-cluster.

In a way, that was an advantage. I saw
those languages not in terms of the communication of meaning but as a
series of symbols that had evolved (or in some instances been
created) for a reason, or a series of reasons. My ignorance led me to
ask questions that might never occur to someone versed in that
language. Why was the Inuktitut script so mathematical? Why was
Baybayin so damn thin it was hard to carve and even harder to paint?

The
phrase “mother tongue” in Baybayin, the pre-colonial script of
the Philippines,

based
on calligraphy/graffiti by Kristian Kabuay.

Carved
in flame cherry

Photo
credit: Tom Way

Why were the letters of Samaritan off
balance? Why did Cherokee have serifs on curves – and come to think
of it, why did it have serifs at all?

And the more I looked at these
unfamiliar scripts, the more I realized we English-speakers never
stop and ask ourselves basic questions about our own language and alphabet.
Why were we so smitten with the Latin alphabet – to such an extent
that the default academic font was called Times New Roman? Why were
we so keen on parallels, right angels, circles, the Euclidean forms
that are in fact impossible to write freehand? What does English have
against diacritics,
when other languages embrace them to such an extent that some scripts
look like a large wet black dog shaking itself?

But the really interesting questions
were about language itself, and the way people instinctively think
about it. For example: it has been fascinating to me how often people
look at my Alphabet carvings and say, “That one looks like an alien script”.
I even though so myself when I first started. I’ve come to think of
this as the Stonehenge phenomenon: when people look at Stonehenge
they see pattern and therefore intent but they can’t
see meaning. That’s a powerful, magnetic phenomenon. They
can’t look away or stop wondering what it means and why it was
created.

I think an “alien” alphabet has the
same qualities: we can see it has shape and purpose and therefore
intent, but it’s so utterly unfamiliar we can’t understand it,
and we can’t even imagine understanding it. So we assume it must
not be of this Earth. More and more, I find myself thinking in such
galactic terms and seeing and hearing language as a series of
variations on the concept of pattern.

“Happy
New Year” in Mongolian calligraphy,

based
on the work of Sukhbaatar.

Carved
in pau amarillo

Photo
credit: Tom Way

Let me explain. When I’ve finished
carving and painting one of my scripts into, say, a piece of curly
maple and then I add the first coat of tung oil, an extraordinary
three-dimensional change takes place. The wood acquires both luster
and depth, as if rising and sinking at the same time. Faint shadows
become deep currents. Knots become cyclones. The grain ripens one
way, but in the same instant a different set of ripples will often
appear running perpendicular to it. The wood becomes anatomical,
muscular. And the black text seems to float both in and above it, as
if it is both part and not part of the wood.

The first time I really looked at this
transformation, it struck me that something fascinating was taking
place in terms of pattern. The grain in the wood and the ripples
running more or less perpendicular to it, looking like patterns in
wet sand, are expressions of the rhythms running through everything.

The verb “la” (‘to
be’) in Nom, the pre-colonial script of Vietnam.

Carved in quilted maple

Photo
credit: Tom Way

Trees have been on this planet for some
370 million years, and the patterns in the grain – well, they
illustrate forces that have been acting on matter since the dawn of
the universe.

Part of the human condition, though, is
to try to see the shape and drift of those forces. We’re
pattern-seeking creatures, after all. And what struck me about
languages, especially when carved in wood, is that they show our own
efforts to understand the world by creating patterns – patterns
that others can recognize and convert into speech, into ideas –
overlaid on the deeper, older, more complex patterns that have made
us what we are.

Tim Brookes is the founder of the
Endangered Alphabets project,
whose carvings have been exhibited all over North America including
at Harvard, Yale, and the Smithsonian Institution. He is also the
author of 16 books, details of which can be found at his homepage.

Saturday, 25 June 2016

Many years ago, I went, as usual, to
fetch my children from Swedish Supply School, which met once a week after regular (English-medium) school in
Singapore, where our family lived. On that particular occasion, one
of the children was especially eager to start telling me all about
her day. She spoke Portuguese, this being the language that the
children and I have always shared, and she speckled it with so much
English and Swedish that I felt compelled to interrupt her.
“Querida!”, I giggled, “Que língua é que estás a falar?!”
(‘Sweetheart! Which language are you speaking?!’). She stared at
me briefly as if I were a clueless alien and then snapped, in squeaky clean Portuguese: “Uma qualquer, para
dizer o que eu quero!” (‘Whichever, to say what I want to say!’).

What was I doing, here? I was giving
evidence that being multilingual, as I am, hadn’t immunised me against the
persuasion that languages are objects of reverence:
they are there to be respected. Which meant that I was paying
attention to my girl’s languages, not to her.

What was she doing? She was giving
evidence that being multilingual, as she is, had made it clear to her
that languages are tools: they are there to serve our needs. She had
last used Portuguese in the early morning, a long time before the end
of her working day, which had
taken place first in English and then in Swedish. So why not use, in
“whichever” language, the bits and pieces of the other language(s)
in which those bits and pieces first became meaningful to her? All of
my children did this, as I discuss in Chapter 10 of my book Three is a Crowd?.
I found it particularly revealing that later, when they and I talked
about these episodes, it was their turn to giggle when reporting
their unawareness that they had been ‘mixing languages’, as this behaviour is
usually called. Besides, as my girl then added about this episode,
she knew that I knew all three languages in question, so “there was
no problem there, right?”

Again, she left me without arguments.
It may be true that only multilinguals in my children’s three
languages might understand what they were saying when they used their
languages in this way, but any multilingual in any languages would
understand what they were doing: they were being typical
multilinguals. The question then arises of why we came to talk about
a feature of typical multilingualism as ‘mixing’, a word with
rather negative undertones. Conversely, we might also ask what it
means to not mix, or switch, languages or codes. Multilingual mixes
usually raise judgemental or worried eyebrows as providing evidence of bad or impaired use of language,
respectively. But “bad/impaired use of language” in fact means
‘bad/impaired use of a language’, and there is a world of
difference between language and a language.
So why don’t monolingual mixes cause generalised unease, and where do we draw the line?

The issue is precisely one of lines.
Like country boundaries, language boundaries are figments of our
collective imagination. Not even linguists have any idea what or where they might be. So why do we go on
interpreting multilingual mixes as offending language boundaries?
Ofelia García, in an interview
conducted by François Grosjean on his blog Life as a Bilingual
and titled What is Translanguaging?,
answers this question pithily:

“Linguists often refer to the
behavior of bilinguals when they go across these named language
categories as code-switching. It is an external view of language. But
translanguaging takes the internal perspective of speakers whose own
mental grammar has been developed in social interaction with others.
[…] Translanguaging is more than going across languages; it is
going beyond named languages and taking the
internal view of the speaker’s language use.”

Languages are there to be used as the
tools that they are, not replicated as straitjacketed instruction manuals.
Different languages make sense to us precisely because they allow us
to engage with what matters to us in different ways, and to give the
right flavour to what we wish to say. To use one of my favourite analogies, how we
deal with our languages is no different from how we deal with our
food. There are (standard) recipes, that we haven’t been called
upon to put together because they were devised and tried by other
people; there are ingredients, and tips about method and seasonings.
But then we do it our way, because we are the ones
doing the cooking.
Favouring observation of each of the languages of multilinguals over
what the multilinguals themselves do with them is like
analysing recipes to find out how they taste. Multilinguals only
transgress those rules that never took multilinguals themselves into account.

The next post, a guest post, keeps to
the topic of creativity, this time about how and why we find ways of
preserving our languages in printed form.

Saturday, 28 May 2016

Do you speak another language?
Many people who have heard this question don’t necessarily speak a
second language (L2) fluently. Learning to speak a new language is
challenging, but fluency in the L2 is a goal many people share.
Contrary to what most people believe, opportunities to interact in
the L2 do not necessarily guarantee a learner will come to speak it
fluently (Derwing, Munro, and Thomson, 2008; Ranta and Meckelborg, 2013), so finding
ways to improve fluency in the classroom is important. From our
recent research, it seems that drama and theatre can help.

If you have ever taken a drama or
theatre class, you will probably agree that it is a lot of fun. But
drama is not all about the entertainment; it can also help language
learners develop speaking abilities (Kao and O’Neill, 1998; Stern, 1980;
Stinson and Freebody, 2006)
and can impact oral fluency and pronunciation in particular (Galante and Thomson, 2016). We
have both taught English as a foreign/second language for many years
in Canada, Brazil, Korea, Oman, and Pakistan. In our constant pursuit
of new ways to help our students develop fluency and pronunciation we
thought we’d give drama/theatre a try.

With my (Angelica’s) background in
theatre, I began using drama techniques to teach my own English
language classes in the late 1990s. I immediately noticed this was
very helpful for learners’ oral development, especially among those
learners who were somewhat shy or reluctant to speak in class. I also
observed that during drama activities, students would practice
aspects of the language not typically offered in traditional language
classes: intonation, rhythm,
intention, meaning-making, improvisation, among others. Because my
drama classes were very well received, I was invited to develop a
language program for a prominent English language institute in São
Paulo, Brazil, which focused on teaching English through drama and
theatre. The program was later distributed among 17 other schools in
the country.

At first, teachers were hesitant to apply drama
techniques because they felt they had to be actors to do so. However,
after some initial short training sessions, teachers implemented
drama in their classroom and were quite satisfied with the positive
results. Despite teachers’ accounts of the success of drama in
their classes, I wondered what particular aspects of oral
communication actually improved. To find out, I proposed carrying out
a study during my Master’s program at Brock University, in Canada,
where Ron Thomson became my thesis supervisor. His extensive
background in second language oral fluency and pronunciation research
was a perfect match.

In drama/theatre classes, there is
quite a lot of speaking practice and both of us knew it was likely
that learners could develop speaking abilities anyway. But we were
interested in finding out whether drama classes could improve
learners’ speaking abilities compared to classes that also focused
on oral communication. We tracked the oral development of 24
Brazilian learners of English in four different classes over the
course of four months: two English drama classes and two English
communicative classes. We collected samples of their L2 speech in
five different tasks (monologue, dialogue, etc.) before and after the
program, all audio-recorded. We then recruited 30 Canadians to listen
to the learners’ speech samples and provide their perceptions on
three specific aspects of their oral performance: fluency,
comprehensibility and accent. After running several statistical
analyses, we found that learners in the drama group experienced
significantly greater improvement in their oral speaking skills
compared to learners in the traditional communicative language
classes.

Photo credit: João Urbilio

In particular, we found that learners
in the drama group experienced significant improvements in fluency
and comprehensibility compared to learners in a communicative
language class. Some of the strategies used in the drama classes had
a particular focus on improving fluency: learners practiced
performance in front of a group, speech with emphasis on
meaning-making, and speaking without inappropriate pauses and
hesitations. This result supports the idea that teaching aspects of
oral language explicitly can result in larger gains in oral fluency
compared to using simple communicative tasks.

Another important finding was that
although all the English learners were perceived as having a first
language (L1) accent (Brazilian Portuguese), this was not an issue
when understanding their speech. This is also important because it
tells us that having L1 accent is not a problem when communicating in
the L2. This can be surprising to some who falsely believe they need
to lose their L1 accent in order to be fluent in the L2. We have
always believed that “accent reduction” courses do not really have a place in language learning, and our
study provides evidence to support this belief.

If you’re interested in learning more
about how drama/theatre can improve speaking skills in a second
language, you can watch the video abstract of our study or read
the article we have recently published in TESOL Quarterly.
There, you will find more details about the study and its
methodology. We also provide samples of the classroom activities we
used.

Angelica Galante is a doctoral
candidate in Language and Literacies Education at the Ontario
Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) at the University of
Toronto and a sessional lecturer at York University. Her research
interests include innovative pedagogical applications in language
classrooms, drama in language learning, and plurilingual education.
You can follow her on Twitter @GalanteAngelica and visit her website
Breaking the Invisible Wall for
samples of digital projects with language learners.

Ron I. Thomson is an Associate Professor of Applied Linguistics/TESL at Brock
University, in St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada. His research spans L2
oral fluency and pronunciation development, computer-assisted
pronunciation teaching, and ethics in pronunciation teaching. Ron is
also the creator of English Accent Coach, a free evidence-based online tool
that helps learners improve their pronunciation of English vowels and
consonants.

LinkWithin

About Me

I’m a freelance
linguist with a keen interest in multilingualism. I was born in
Portugal, acquired French in Africa at age 3, married a Swede a
little later, raised three trilingual children (mostly) in Singapore,
and I work (mostly) in English. Homepage: Being Multilingual

Copyright notice and Disclaimer

The material in this blog is copyrighted to me. If you wish to quote or reproduce it, in part or in whole, or use it in any other way, you must seek my permission first. The blog source, Being Multilingual, and my full name, Madalena Cruz-Ferreira, should be acknowledged at all times in copyright credits.

The owner of this blog is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.